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The conversion of an Episcopalian minister

At workingthebeads.com, Jonathan Mitchican announced that he will be joining the Catholic Church. “In many ways I feel very sad,” he admitted. He has served as an Anglo-Catholic priest, has been married and has baptised his children in an Episcopal church.

Mitchican had tried to resist, but “the more I struggled against this calling, the more calmly and consistently the Lord repeated it.”

There is a difference, he wrote, “between reading St Thomas Aquinas and being in communion with St Thomas Aquinas. There is a difference between knowing that a common baptism unites us as brothers and sisters in Christ and actually seeing the footprint of that in history. There is a difference between loving the tradition of the Church, even trying very hard to apply that tradition to new circumstances, and recognising my place as just one sailor on a sea of tradition that I cannot control but that will always carry me home.”

The meaning of Jesus’s words about judging

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” At his Patheos blog, Fr Dwight Longenecker asked how we can live out this Gospel teaching. Jesus’s target was the “self-righteous religious people”, as well as “an ancient and immature trick: I make myself feel better by putting someone else down.” But since the verse is sometimes abused, it’s worth interpreting it in the light of another of Jesus’s teachings: “Do not judge by appearances, but make righteous judgments.”

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